by Ed Mooney
A good philosopher makes you think – not just adopt an opinion or give you something to believe or believe in (or not believe or believe in). A good philosopher makes you put on the brakes, stop the mind from racing along in its familiar tracks. Here’s a good philosopher, Kelly Jolley, thinking out loud about poetry. Listening to him put the brakes on and made me think: Poetry is a way of getting something to take on a body. […]
Categories: ZiR
In his collection of essays, What the Twilight Says, Nobel prize-winning poet Derek Walcott discusses, among other things, fellow writers of the Caribbean, including the Marxist historian CLR James. In his short piece on James, Walcott explores the seeming contradiction between the writer’s unrelenting combat against Empire and the racism it engendered, and his love for the very British game of cricket. James’s Beyond a Boundary is probably less well known than his classic work The Black Jacobins, the history […]
Categories: Catherine Vigier, ZiR • Tags: History, literature, race
Columbia Magazine, The Guardian and various other media outlets published moving articles to commemorate poet John Berryman’s centennial,. For those who don’t know much about the poet, it is a great opportunity to get to know him. For those who do, it is perhaps a chance to learn something new, something more. “Columbia Magazine’s” piece includes several excerpts from the poet’s work, along with “He Resigns” below: He Resigns Age, and the deaths, and the ghosts. Her having gone away in spirit from […]
Categories: Ana Maria Caballero, ZiR
Every now and then I like to look at the stories told by teenagers on slam poetry contests (see 5 November 2013). Here is an excerpt from Patrick Roche’s performance at the 2014 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational in Colorado. The poem tells Roche’s experience growing up in a shattered family, possibly repressing his homosexuality. While Patrick counts down from age 21, we get a sense of the events that led him to become the kind of resilient (perhaps resenting?) young adult he […]
Categories: Alexia Raynal, ZiR • Tags: children
by Ed Mooney
Well, it’s Spring Break, or Spring Break is just over, and if it’s over, then Florida beaches may return to normal for this time of year. A friend, in a stroke of genius, remembered an apt line from Nietzsche. If not “found-art,” then in a relevant sense, “found-philosophy.” Here it is, from Morgenröte (The Break of Day or Dawn): The only thing that cannot be refused to these poor beasts of burden is their “holidays”—such is the name they give to […]
Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: Hilary Putnam, holidays, Marx, Nietzsche, spring break, Thoreau, vacation
Sometimes you read a story so beautiful it stays in your head for days, and you keep going back to it, trying to understand how it got such a hold on your imagination. Kiss of the Fur Queen is that kind of story. Tomson Highway’s heartbreaking semi-autobiographical novel is about two Cree Indian brothers, Champion and Ooneemeetoo, who spend the early years of their childhood on a reservation in Northern Manitoba. Baptized Jeremiah and Gabriel, they are sent to a […]
Categories: Catherine Vigier, ZiR • Tags: childhood, homosexuality, sexual assault
A few nights ago I dreamt that a close friend and I were stalking Bertolt Brecht in Paris. Since I rarely have such intellectual dreams, I took it as a sign to read some of the German writer and thinker’s work. Although Brecht is perhaps best remembered for his contributions to theater, he is also considered to be one of the greatest German poets that ever lived. Brecht’s approach to poetry, as opposed to the way in which he took on […]
Categories: Ana Maria Caballero, ZiR • Tags: books, History, literature, poetry, reading, theater, writing
by Ed Mooney
Could Milton write this? How charming is divine Philosophy Not harsh and crabbed as dull fools suppose but musical as is Apollo’s lute He writes these lines as part of a masque in honor of chastity, presented September 29, 1634, before the Earl of Bridgewater, newly installed as President of Wales. So these lines may not express his true sentiments but rather his wish to please the Earl. And note that Milton has Apollo praise chastity. The […]
Just after St. Patrick’s Day is a good time to have a laugh reading Flann O’Brien, pseudonym of Brian O Nolan, one of the most satirical Irish writers ever. In the late 1930s and throughout the 40s, when there was nothing much to laugh about in the New Irish State, O Nolan kept up a steady barrage of satire in his novels and newspaper columns which spared none of those in power. The Hard Life was published in 1961, but […]
Categories: Catherine Vigier • Tags: literature
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